Money As We Knew It?

I am persistently plagued by a strange vision of wealth, triumph and liberation. However much I fight it, I cannot extricate myself from that dream: suddenly, I see myself swimming in gold.
Léon Bloy, Diary, 19 June 1902footnote¹

Throw a dollar at me, would ya? How does it feel to have a million thrown at you?
Carl Barks, ‘Letter to Santa’footnote²

Money gives us pleasure, Brecht needlessly told us, but that is not what will be meant here—not the kind of pleasure ignited by money because we lust after the unlimited opportunities it promises. We should rather be thinking of something more banal and mysterious: of the intrinsic sensuousness of the actual money itself—small metal discs, or oblong strips of rustling, crackling paper. In Balzac, an artist tries to marry into a bourgeois family; he carelessly remarks that money is there to be spent—since it is round, it must roll. The father of the family, reacting with the deepest mistrust, replies: ‘If it is round for prodigals, it is flat for economical people who pile it up.’footnote³ The opposite approaches of the bohemian and the rentier (by the end of the tale they have comfortably fused) converge in images of the concrete pleasures of money. Both are thinking of the ways in which hands unconsciously encircle coins, a physical sensation. One man high-spiritedly lets them roll loose, the other deliberately stacks them on top of each other, with greedy precision. The spendthrift and the miser both feel the coins between their fingers.

The object of the following capriccio is the invisible stamp of this physical contact in our daily lives—and its gradual disappearance. Its concern is with the experience caught in one of the finest stories by Karen Blixen: ‘Mr. Clay said, “The sailor told the others that he had held a five guinea piece in the palm of his hand, and that he felt the weight and the cold of gold upon it”’.footnote⁴

It could be that in the near future Benjamin’s concept of aura—which in simple terms means that something assumes a particularly intense and melancholy power of fascination at the moment of its disappearance—might apply to money. Are not those of us born before 1990 the last generations that really know money, the last for whom familiarity with it is second nature? Not in the sense of a monetary economy at large—which is certainly not vanishing, but flourishing as never before, indeed celebrating the most disastrous victories—but that of an intimate, daily contact with coinage and banknotes. We have been used to money as an object for so long that it comes as a tiny shock to visualize what will disappear in a monetary system without cash: money (we will soon be saying) ‘as we knew it’.

To anticipate this future: contrary to every repetition of non olet, it was once possible to be repelled by money (Arno Schmidt: ‘out of spite, get all the coins cleaned before touching them’;footnote⁵ and in certain exclusive hotels, guests indeed had their money washed overnight). You could also play with it—as a worry bead, or a spinning top on a table. That parents warned: ‘Money is not to be played with!’ made it even more attractive to children, most of whom at one time or another played a game of skill, not just for but actually with money, throwing coins to make them land as close to the foot of a wall as possible. The coin was plaything and reward in one, as posterity will be able to study in old films—think of Steve McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid or Danny Aiello in The Purple Rose of Cairo. Money was an oracle: heads or tails. A coin could be the prop for big, dramatic gestures—Claude Akins inviting an inebriated Dean Martin to fish his silver dollar out of the spittoon in Rio Bravo. In River of No Return, Marilyn Monroe singing ‘One silver dollar’ . . . But it is better to stop here, Westerns alone unleashing a cataract of such recollections, of which readers can no doubt evoke a few of their own.

Among the many celebrated or legendary coins—from Judas’s thirty pieces of silver to the doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast—worriedly recalled by the narrator in Borges’s ‘El Zahir’, one of the most striking is that which betrayed a fleeing Louis xvi at Varennes. Embossed on every coin of the realm, the image of the monarch acts as a ‘Wanted’ poster when the king tries to escape unrecognized. This homecoming of hundreds of thousands of coins to their individual origin has something dizzying about it. The effect is similar to those strange limit-cases of exchange constructed by Stevenson in ‘The Bottle Imp’, in which the characters need an ever smaller denomination to sell the diabolical object on to the next person for a lower price than they paid for it, or Mark Twain’s story ‘The £1,000,000 Bank-Note’, in which the denomination is so large that you never need to break into it, since no-one can give you change or would even expect to receive money from anyone so rich. Yet the mystery of money lies not so much in such extreme cases as in its mere material existence as a physical object. ‘The clerk in Terry Kelly’s said A crown! but the consignor held out for six shillings, and in the end the six shillings was allowed him literally. He came out of the pawn-office joyfully, making a little cylinder of the coins between his thumb and fingers’—the fleetingly tangible and meaningful object of a vignette in Dubliners.footnote⁶ Are we getting closer to ‘the riddle of the money fetish’ Marx harped upon?